News Article

LulzSec Members Who Hacked Nintendo Plead Guilty To Charges

Three UK-based LulzSec hackers have pleaded guilty to charges of hacking various high-profile targets — one of which was Nintendo — and setting up DDoS (distributed denial of services) attacks.

The incident involving Nintendo occurred back in 2011. No permanent harm was done, but a configuration file was taken by the group and mentioned on Twitter:

26-year-old Ryan Ackroyd — who hid behind the persona of a 16-year-old girl named "Kayla" when online — admitted to the charges yesterday, and also revealed that he worked with fellow hacking group Anonymous.

Two other LulzSec members - Jake "Topiary" Davis, 20, and Mustafa "Tflow" Al-Bassam, 18 — have also admitted hacking and planning DDoS attacks. LulzSec was apparently disbanded at the end of 2011.

All three hackers — along with fellow Brit Ryan Cleary, who was arrested in 2011 — will be sentenced on May 14th.

Damien has over a decade of professional writing experience under his belt, as well as a repulsively hairy belly. Rumours that he turned down a role in The Hobbit to work on Nintendo Life are, to the best of our knowledge, completely and utterly unfounded.

I wonder if they did this to get job offers like the guy who hacked his school's computer system (before being expelled) and got around 10 offers, including on from the same company that worked on the school's program.

On a side note, I love that no one bats an eye that a 26-year-old man have a online persona of a 16-year-old girl. Things that makes you go hmm

What is sad is that those people can really do some good with those skills they have yet they decide to use them to do mischievous things. Oh well maybe they will get wise when they are older like Kevin Metnick did.

we need hackers in this world as long there not hurting any 1 there is to many secretes in this world that are kept away from us like if there is life in outer space that's why we need hackers to let us know things that the government wont that is a fact of life

Stuff like this is just the start. Eventually, there will be a new law passed down on the Internet and the wild west of online practices will be gone. Goodbye, LulzSec, goodbye, Anonymous. This change is inevitable and it'll be up to the users to adapt. I'm not saying it'll be like SOPA, PIPA, or CISPA, but something will be done in a regulation sense.

I recognize that group by seeing that Twitter profile picture on the game informer. I've heard that they've hacking a number of video games and other related software. I wonder what would happen if this keeps up?

I think Anonymous and any branch of it is just totally stupid. Kids on the internet who posted inappropriate pics on 4-chan are fighting against evil, and capitalism? They can't earn my respect, and it doesn't matter how much they DDOS websites, they can't destroy governments.

Hackers would have you believe they are just trying to make the world a more free and open place but many of them are just in it for a laugh and don't even think about the consequences. Some of them are clearly in it for bad reasons and if you believe our governments, most of the bad kind of hacking comes from Russia and China.

As much as it pisses us off when we feel we are the ones who get punished by someone else's hacking, there are people trying to prevent information suppression and many other evils in the world and their computer skill is the only thing working against some very evil people. As groups like Anonymous get larger or more powerful, there will be many things they do that could inconvenience us but the chances are, they will be uncovering truths we didn't know about.

Of course they could all be part of some big government conspiracy to make us believe there were hacking groups spreading truth that is actually misinformation but I doubt they'd be publicly arresting these kids if that was the case.

Anonymous exposed a large network of paedophiles using Twitter to privately share child abuse pictures. As far as I am aware, twitter, the police and our own secret services had not even attempted to shut down these sick bastards before this happened. They also took down other sites that were showing stuff of a similar nature which have led to arrests.

If someone does something, against someone evil that the powers that be are doing nothing about, how can they be considered the bad guy?

@Nintenjoe64: sure, Anonymous has done good things like what you're describing, but bad things have also been done in their name... the problem is that, due to their inherent anonymity, there's no way to tell which 'Anonymous' is which, so they all get lumped together in the public eye. Anyone can stand up, claim to be a member of Anonymous, and no one knows the difference because it's impossible to tell.

sorry but hackers do NOT look like that. hackers are the biggest losers on the planet, have never had a friend of the opposite (or same most likely, which they would prefer lol) sex in their life, and are quite simply the saddest losers in the modern world.

as someone else stated, hackers only cause gov'ts to exert more control over the internet (which was supposed to be free)

hackers will constantly try to say they do things for this good and that. but it is just plain stupid to think hacking does anything to help the cause of keeping the internet free

Anonymous is not one person and is definitely not an intelligent hacker, for starters. And anonymous hardly does "all good." you'd be wise to look more into that buddy. Anonymous is also purely emotionally driven, which is very scary. Anonymous tries to the work that is better left to experts with real intelligence and moxie.

@Five-seveN: I'm no official programmer, but when I go back to college, I may finish becoming one. A config file is exactly what it is a shorthand for: a configuration file. A config file generally contains some basic information parameters for any given program that uses one. For instance, a game using a config file might resemble something similar to this:

That kind of thing. This is merely an example of how a config file might, but doesn't have to, look like.

Config files are used often in some os's(Operating systems, such as Windows for example)

Config files are/can be also what generally tell pc games what controller to "listen to" during gameplay for input, & what buttons do what actions.

But config files have many uses. I'm just giving you some examples. In this case, it could have been a webpage script, intranet(internal internet) network data of sorts, or some data relevant to how Nintendo's hardware systems are coded. In the last choice, that would mean that group had illegal access to copyright code. Hope that helps.